diff --git a/examples/ablation/diagnostics/public_scale_20260702.md b/examples/ablation/diagnostics/public_scale_20260702.md
index 9ca4b94..8da4151 100644
--- a/examples/ablation/diagnostics/public_scale_20260702.md
+++ b/examples/ablation/diagnostics/public_scale_20260702.md
@@ -66,21 +66,26 @@ Manual large-tier shard from BEIR/MS MARCO passage validation:
 | Docs | Queries | MRR@10 | R@5 | R@10 | Hit@10 | Build | Search |
 |-----:|--------:|-------:|----:|-----:|-------:|------:|-------:|
 | 100,000 | 50 | 0.673 | 0.740 | 0.770 | 39/50 | 81.9s | 5.4s |
+| 1,000,000 | 50 | 0.462 | 0.543 | 0.580 | 30/50 | 1913.3s | 69.9s |
 
 The local artifacts are gitignored:
 
 - `tests/benchmark/data/msmarco_passage.json` - 511 KB manifest
-- `tests/benchmark/data/msmarco_passage.corpus.jsonl` - 35 MB corpus shard
+- `tests/benchmark/data/msmarco_passage.corpus.jsonl` - 35 MB at 100k, 361 MB at 1M
 
 ## Interpretation
 
 - Search latency remains usable at 171k docs: 5.2s over 10 queries.
 - MS MARCO confirms the large-tier path on a web passage corpus: 100k docs,
   50 queries, 5.4s total search, and 0.673 MRR@10 without embeddings or reranking.
+- MS MARCO 1M is now proven end-to-end, but it is a heavy manual tier:
+  31.9 minutes build time and 69.9s total search for 50 queries.
 - The main large-corpus bottleneck is still initial FTS/index build, not retrieval.
 - Avoiding unnecessary FTS deletes for newly inserted nodes reduced full FiQA build time by about 9.9x.
 - Raising benchmark ingest batches to 20k reduced full TREC-COVID build time by about 2.7x.
 - `--corpus-limit` provides practical staged scale gates while preserving selected query gold docs.
+- Long 1M runs should use ingest progress output; without it the build phase is
+  too quiet for practical monitoring.
 
 ## Guard Policy
 
diff --git a/examples/ablation/run_tier1_benchmarks.py b/examples/ablation/run_tier1_benchmarks.py
index 2fdba61..5708a99 100644
--- a/examples/ablation/run_tier1_benchmarks.py
+++ b/examples/ablation/run_tier1_benchmarks.py
@@ -274,6 +274,7 @@ async def run_one(
     embed_batch: int = 256,
     ingest_batch: int = 20000,
     corpus_limit: int | None = None,
+    progress_every: int = 100000,
 ) -> Report:
     if not ds.path.exists():
         raise FileNotFoundError(
@@ -316,6 +317,18 @@ async def run_one(
     # ``graph.add()`` accepts an ``embedding`` arg; if we pass it we
     # avoid the per-node single embed call that bottlenecks at batch=1.
     items = _load_corpus_items(data, ds.path, qrels, query_items, corpus_limit)
+    total_items = len(items)
+
+    def maybe_print_progress(done: int, start: float) -> None:
+        if progress_every <= 0:
+            return
+        if done < total_items and done % progress_every != 0:
+            return
+        elapsed = time.perf_counter() - start
+        print(
+            f"  ingest: {done:,}/{total_items:,} docs ({elapsed:.1f}s)",
+            flush=True,
+        )
 
     embeddings: list[list[float] | None] = [None] * len(items)
     if embedder is not None:
@@ -327,8 +340,10 @@ async def run_one(
                 embeddings[i + j] = v if v else None
 
     save_nodes_batch = getattr(backend, "save_nodes_batch", None)
+    t_ingest = time.perf_counter()
     if phrase_extractor is None and callable(save_nodes_batch):
         for i in range(0, len(items), ingest_batch):
+            done = min(i + ingest_batch, total_items)
             batch = [
                 Node(
                     id=_benchmark_node_id(doc_id),
@@ -344,8 +359,9 @@ async def run_one(
                 )
             ]
             await save_nodes_batch(batch)
+            maybe_print_progress(done, t_ingest)
     else:
-        for (doc_id, title, text), emb in zip(items, embeddings):
+        for idx, ((doc_id, title, text), emb) in enumerate(zip(items, embeddings), start=1):
             await graph.add(
                 title=title,
                 content=text,
@@ -353,6 +369,7 @@ async def run_one(
                 embedding=emb,
                 record_memory_event=False,
             )
+            maybe_print_progress(idx, t_ingest)
 
     # Post-hoc DF-filtered entity linking (opt-in via --entity-linker).
     # Runs AFTER ingest because the DF filter needs global corpus
@@ -445,6 +462,7 @@ def _emit_markdown(
     entity_linker_label: str = "none",
     corpus_limit: int | None = None,
     ingest_batch: int = 20000,
+    progress_every: int = 100000,
 ) -> Path:
     OUT_DIR.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
     stamp = time.strftime("%Y%m%d_%H%M%S")
@@ -456,6 +474,7 @@ def _emit_markdown(
         f"- Subset: {subset if subset else 'full'}",
         f"- Corpus limit: {corpus_limit if corpus_limit else 'full'}",
         f"- Ingest batch: {ingest_batch}",
+        f"- Progress every: {progress_every if progress_every > 0 else 'disabled'}",
         f"- Embedder: {embedder_label}",
         f"- Reranker: {reranker_label}",
         f"- Decomposer: {decomposer_label}",
@@ -575,6 +594,14 @@ async def amain(argv: list[str]) -> int:
         default=20000,
         help="Batch size for benchmark corpus node writes (default: 20000).",
     )
+    p.add_argument(
+        "--progress-every",
+        type=int,
+        default=100000,
+        help=(
+            "Print ingest progress every N docs during build (default: 100000; set 0 to disable)."
+        ),
+    )
     p.add_argument(
         "--corpus-limit",
         type=int,
@@ -766,6 +793,7 @@ async def amain(argv: list[str]) -> int:
     print(f"  entity linker: {entity_linker_label}")
     print(f"  corpus limit: {args.corpus_limit if args.corpus_limit else 'full'}")
     print(f"  ingest batch: {args.ingest_batch}")
+    print(f"  progress every: {args.progress_every if args.progress_every > 0 else 'disabled'}")
     if embedder is not None:
         print(f"  embed batch: {args.embed_batch}")
     print()
@@ -788,6 +816,7 @@ async def amain(argv: list[str]) -> int:
                 embed_batch=args.embed_batch,
                 ingest_batch=args.ingest_batch,
                 corpus_limit=args.corpus_limit,
+                progress_every=args.progress_every,
             )
         except FileNotFoundError as e:
             print(f"{ds.name:<24}  SKIP — {e}")
@@ -810,6 +839,7 @@ async def amain(argv: list[str]) -> int:
             entity_linker_label=entity_linker_label,
             corpus_limit=args.corpus_limit,
             ingest_batch=args.ingest_batch,
+            progress_every=args.progress_every,
         )
         print()
         print(f"Markdown report → {out.relative_to(REPO_ROOT)}")
diff --git a/tests/test_tier1_benchmarks.py b/tests/test_tier1_benchmarks.py
index 0f6d7e8..d3959bc 100644
--- a/tests/test_tier1_benchmarks.py
+++ b/tests/test_tier1_benchmarks.py
@@ -106,6 +106,37 @@ async def test_jsonl_corpus_limit_keeps_selected_query_gold_docs(tmp_path):
     assert report.recall_at_10 == 1.0
 
 
+@pytest.mark.asyncio
+async def test_progress_every_reports_ingest_progress(tmp_path, capsys):
+    path = tmp_path / "tiny_bench.json"
+    path.write_text(
+        json.dumps(
+            {
+                "corpus": {
+                    "gold_doc": {"title": "Gold", "text": "needle targetterm"},
+                    "filler": {"title": "Filler", "text": "unrelated alpha"},
+                },
+                "queries": {"q1": "targetterm"},
+                "qrels": {"q1": {"gold_doc": 1}},
+            }
+        ),
+        encoding="utf-8",
+    )
+
+    await runner.run_one(
+        runner.Dataset(name="Tiny", path=path, reference="unit"),
+        subset=1,
+        corpus_limit=2,
+        ingest_batch=1,
+        progress_every=1,
+    )
+
+    output = capsys.readouterr().out
+
+    assert "ingest: 1/2 docs" in output
+    assert "ingest: 2/2 docs" in output
+
+
 def test_threshold_violations_report_scale_regressions():
     report = runner.Report(
         name="Tiny",